The Man in the Wooden Hat Page 19

  “You can have anything you want of mine if I don’t come back,” he had said.

  Filth had said, “Oh, nothing, thanks. Maybe the chessmen.”

  One afternoon during a St. Martin’s summer, his bony knees under a tartan rug, Filth was snoozing in the garden when he became aware of a movement in one of the fruit trees and a new next-door child dropped out of it eating an apple. The child began to wander nonchalantly over the lawn as if he owned it. Filth had been reading minutes of the latest Bench Table of his Inn. He felt like throwing the child back over the hedge.

  “Sorry,” the child said.

  “I suppose you’re wanting a ball back.”

  “I haven’t got a ball.”

  “Well, what’s that in your hand? And I don’t mean my apple.”

  “Just some old beads I found in that flower bed.” And he vanished.

  They’re so bloody self-confident, thought Filth. My prep-school Headmaster would have settled him. Then: What am I saying? Sir’d have set about teaching him something about apples.

  “Keep the beads,” he called. “They’re yours.”

  The night before he was to leave for his voyage home to Malaya, Filth felt such a surge of longing for Betty that he had to sit down and close his eyes. The longing had included guilt. Why guilt? Because he was beginning to forget her. Forget his long desire. “Memory and desire,” he said aloud, “I must keep track of them or the game’s up.” Then he thought: Or maybe let them go?

  There was a ring at his doorbell and a family stood grimly on his doorstep, father, mother, son and daughter.

  “Might we come in? We are from next door,” said the father (a gent, though long-haired). “We need to speak to you on a serious matter.”

  “Come in.”

  They filed into the hall. “Sebastian,” said the father and the boy held out Betty’s pearl necklace.

  “He says you gave it him. We want to know the truth. He says he found it in a flower bed.”

  “Yes. I did. He did. Perfectly right.” (The look in the parents’ eyes. Think I’m a paedophile?)

  “You see—sir,” said the father. “We believe these pearls to be valuable.”

  “Yes. I expect they are. They were my wife’s. Given her by some old boyfriend. She threw them away. Silly woman. She had much better ones from me. Mine have been inherited by some cousin, I think. These—well, I’ll be glad to see the last of them. Her “guilty pearls”, I called them.”

  “Well, really—we couldn’t . . .”

  “I’m just off on a trip. Look, if you want to repay me could you just keep an eye on the house while I’m away? I have a spare key here. For emergencies.” He handed them the key that knew its way about their house. “I hear that you are what is called ‘Green.’ And aren’t you intellectuals?”

  “I’m not,” said the little girl.

  “Dad is,” said the boy. “He’s a poet.”

  “Good, good—”

  “And I’m going to do bed and breakfast,” said the wife. “I hope you don’t mind if I put up a sign on our lane?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  When he stepped off the still-vibrating plane and smelled the East again, the hot airport, the hot jungle, the heavy scents of spices and humans and tropical trees and tropical food, Filth forgot everything else and knew that memory was now unnecessary and all desire fulfilled. Betty at his shoulder, he fell into the everlasting arms. The mystery and darkness and warmth of the womb returned him to the beginning of everything and to the end of all need.

  His memorial service, several months later at the other side of the world, was distinguished but rather small. It was so very long since Sir Edward Feathers had been in practice. His years alone with Hudson had been solitary and long, and his age was so great that few lawyers could remember him as a person.

  Nevertheless quite a good scattering turned up. In the Benchers’ pews the Lord Chief Justice sat, for Feathers had been a great name in his time—when the Lord Chief was probably still at school. The Master of the Temple preached on Feathers’ integrity and advocacy (“in a style no doubt we would now find a little dated!”), his bravery in World War Two, his long, quiet, happy marriage. His charm. He had kept clear of politics, given himself entirely to the importance of the tenets of English Law. We shall not see his like again . . . etc.

  “Who’s that creature?” asked one of Amy’s children. Amy’s grandchildren and children made quite a mob in the public pews. “Just below the pulpit. He looks like a pickled walnut.”

  Albert Ross had, in fact, been asked by an usher to move from the seats reserved permanently for Masters of the Temple but had taken no notice. Across from him in an equally regal seat in the Middle Temple Benchers’ pews, a legitimate lawyer who looked preserved in aspic was glaring across at him. It was Fiscal-Smith accompanying dear old Dulcie. He had a cheap-day return railway ticket sticking out of his pocket.

  In the body of the church, across from Amy’s family but a modest pew or so behind them, sat the family of Sir Edward Feathers’s neighbours, the mother wearing a double string of remarkable pearls. Several pews around had filled up quite nicely with members of the Bar of the Construction Industry, particularly those from the Chambers that Sir Edward and the pickled walnut had founded. There was a clutch of clerks, one of whom had been in his pram when Sir Edward was sitting disconsolate in a draughty corridor without any work one winter’s afternoon.

  Then a tall and beautiful and very old woman came in and slid in beside Amy, looking at nobody. She wore a pale silk coat and her face was an enigma.

  “Who’s that? She’s like the collarbone of a hare,” said the poet. “I bet it was his mistress.”

  They sang the usual hymns, “I vow to thee my country” being the most inappropriate. Filth’s country had never been England.

  Outside afterwards, they all gathered to hear the bell toll once for every year of Filth’s life and it seemed as if it would go on for ever. It was autumn and gold dry leaves scratched under their feet.

  The dwarf, the pickled walnut, was being helped into his Rolls-Royce. He handed his large felt hat to the Chief Clerk. “I’ve done with it,” he said. “Keep it in the Chambers. It is your foundation stone.”

  “Aren’t you coming in to the wake, Mr. Ross?”

  “No. Plane to catch. I am en route to Kabul. Goodbye.” Waving a hero’s wave he was spirited away.

  “Is it all a pantomime?” asked one of the children and the poet said, “Something of the sort.”

  Inside the Parliament Chamber of the Inner Temple Hall the wine was flowing now and the famous hat went from hand to hand. Someone said, “He’s supposed to have kept his playing cards in that hat.”

  “Well, there’s a zip across the inside of it.”

  So they unzipped it and found the playing cards fastened in a pouch.

  “What’s that other thing in there?” asked the next-door boy.

  It was a small oilskin packet tied with very old string, and inside it was a watch.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to kind friends Charles and Caroline Worth, who have tried to check the topography of Hong Kong in the 1950s—an almost impossible task, and to Richard Wallington, who has answered a number of questions about the English Bar in Hong Kong. Thanks to William Mayne, for information about East Pakistan.

  And gratitude to Richard Ingrams who, almost ten years ago now, asked for a Christmas story in the Oldie and released from somewhere in my sub-conscious Sir Edward Feathers QC, who has dominated three books and a large part of my life ever since. Particular thanks to my editor Penelope Hoare who has been, as ever, indispensable. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

  Most of all, thanks to my husband David Gardam, especially for memories of our travels to places where the English Law continues to be heard.

  Jane Gardam

  Sandwich, Kent

  2009

  About the Author

  Jane Gardam is the only writer to have bee
n twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year (for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land). She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature.

  She has published four volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); and most recently, Missing the Midnight.

  Her novels include God on the Rocks (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Faith Fox, The Flight of the Maidens and most recently Old Filth, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

  Jane Gardam lives with her husband in England.